Light Showers.

Reviewed on PlayStation 3

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October 1, 2013

I’ll remember Rain for making me feel lonely and lost, far away from home with the night still ahead.

Its strength lies almost entirely in evoking that mood – a very particular feeling of childlike anxiety mixed with a more mature sense of melancholia. It creates this through a distinctive art style, minimalist storytelling, and a score that almost becomes a character in itself. But the gameplay – solving simple puzzles with simple platforming – adds relatively little to the experience. This shortcoming is felt more keenly, when you consider the elegance of Rain’s central conceit: its main characters are invisible until they step out into the rain, where they cast shimmering silhouettes. This delicate idea is never fully developed, though, preventing Rain from becoming something truly special.

Rain’s story is intentionally sparse. There are no names and few specifics, giving it a timeless, dreamlike quality. Set in an archetypal European city, the story follows a boy who pursues a girl into an alternate dimension where it’s always raining. The night is filled with monsters, though – spectral figures that, like the boy and girl, can only be seen when they step into rain. They have wonderfully unusual designs – ghostly giants and dog-like creature constructed out of bone. There’s one figure – The Unknown – who pursues you relentlessly. Towering over the boy, he’s a fierce and daunting presence; equipped with a what looks like a conductor’s baton, he menacingly scours the sodden streets looking for you. There’s almost something teacherly about his stern presence, underscoring that feeling of youthful anxiety.

This creates some of Rain’s most memorable moments. A big part of its gameplay centres on the boy’s ability to vanish when he stands under cover – there’s lots of conveniently placed verandas and doorways where the rain is shut out. There’s something quite unsettling about hiding in what feels like plain sight. When The Unknown is standing right in front of you, looking right through you, Rain can be a tremendously unsettling experience.

But the possibilities of its core mechanic are never fully explored. Early on, it seems like that’s the intention, with it quickly being elaborating upon. There are docile creatures which you can hide beneath, providing cover that moves. Scaffolding can be knocked down, by baiting creatures, to create new pathways. Muddy puddles stain your legs, revealing your location when you come in out of the rain. However, these are almost always introduced to help you navigate a specific section, and are then abandoned. They never build into a repertoire of abilities. Consequently, the complexity never really increases; it’s more a case of repeating the action you just learned, rather than relying on your imagination or ingenuity.

Rain becomes more involving when you catch up with the girl. From here on, there’s more collaboration, with the two figures helping each other out: the girl dropping blocks for the boy to climb, the boy lifting the girl to higher ground. It still isn’t all that taxing. Rain wants to immerse you within a mood, rather than really challenge you. It’s much more about experiencing a setting, wallowing in its tone, than overcoming a series of obstacles. My favourite sections were running down the cobbled roads illuminated by street lights. Or the bits when I was entirely invisible, my presence detectable only through interactions with the bottles, old newspapers, and discarded chairs that litter the alleyways. It’s profoundly disorientating to navigate a platforming section without a visible character, and it really imparts a feeling of loneliness and detachment.

The world has a slightly impressionistic look and a watery colour palette dominates early on. Locations change – you pass through a church and a factory, and wander down endless streets – and as quaint as some of those locations are, it all looks very similar very soon, creating a slight sense of monotony. Rain really benefits from a lift in the third act, when it strays into more surreal territory, with the cityscape rearranging itself into a more nightmarish labyrinth. It’s a well-judged change of tone and pace, with anxiety dominating the experience, overtaking the early melancholia. You’re so close to home, but still so far.

Perspective and music also form a big part of the experience. The camera is tightly controlled, drawing your eyes towards the solutions to most puzzles, and the music plays a huge role in creating the heartache of this washed-out world. Given the attention to the soundscape, I can’t fathom why such an ugly noise was used for when the boy’s key interactions with the world. Each time you climb a ladder or push a block, it’s punctuated by a noise that would be more in keeping with a home computer from 10 years ago. This might seem like real nitpicking, but the creation of a consistent mood is at the very heart of what Rain is trying to achieve.

Rain’s conclusion (without delving into specific) isn’t as satisfying or as rapturous as I was expecting, either. It’s slightly undermined by its structure, which contains one too many false endings, and it heaps too much significance upon reaching a certain location during its build-up. At the end, you're left feeling (rather appropriately) ever so slightly hollow.